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<title>Gudrin Wulfsdottir by incantrix</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26532568">Gudrin Wulfsdottir</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/incantrix/pseuds/incantrix'>incantrix</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>World of Greyhawk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 05:53:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,363</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26532568</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/incantrix/pseuds/incantrix</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Background for one of my many alter-egos</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Gudrin Wulfsdottir</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She woke in a cold sweat to the screams of the dying, women and children mostly, butchered for the crime of being born on land a greedy man wanted. Even now, years later and hundreds of leagues away from the violence of that night she couldn't escape the cries of the innocent. They sought her out through the black gulfs of despair and reminded her again of the guilt she would carry with her until the end of her days.</p><p>She'd been with the Greens then. A crack unit built up by Lord High Commander Gillings. She'd served with them since she'd been inducted as a shivering ninny on a rainy Market Day in Upper Calthrop, a raw recruit with just about enough sense to recognize the business end of a spear. But that hadn't lasted long. She'd taken to soldiering like a duck to water. Long watches, sudden marches, close order drills, she loved it all. The camaraderie of the corps, they called it, and she sucked it up in bucketfuls. She'd risen in the ranks too. Recruit, trooper, lancer, finally squad leader -- as high as she could go -- being base born after all.</p><p>She'd learned how to fight in the ranks, axe and shield on foot, then spear and finally lance from horseback. Soldier's weapons. Cheap to make but dealing out a lot of damage. And damage was what the Greens were about. When you wanted to put a hurt on someone, you hired the Greens -- light infantry that could march twenty leagues in a day and hit as hard as a smith's hammer the moment they arrived.</p><p>That's what they got paid to do, and while Lord High Commander Gillings was in charge, that's what they'd done. Fought hard against other mercenary troops, or occasionally against levies, though anyone who was stupid enough to put levies in front of the Greens deserved to lose the battle, as they inevitably would. But Gillings got old. And passed the Greens on to his nephew. </p><p>Lord High Commander Ser Bondwin made sure everyone knew he was an aristocrat. A strutting popinjay, more like, who had less knowledge about warcraft than she had had the day she was inducted.</p><p>Not for him the glory of leadership. He stayed at court and sent the Greens into battle for the highest bidder. And the highest bidder that year had been Baron Foss. Gillings would no more have wiped his boots on Foss than he would drink piss, but Ser Bondwin wanted to impress the man and ordered the Greens to do his bidding for the season. </p><p>As it turned out, that was the year that Foss decided to take the Dragon's Neck, a rich peninsula of land in the Bay of Lions. Settled for years, hundreds of leagues from any battles, the land was populated by farming villages and market towns, dotted with small forests and crisscrossed by hedgerows. The sort of place a soldier dreams of retiring to. Undefended, freed by charter a dozen generations past, Foss had set his sights on owning the land, and he required that it be cleansed. He whipped up a frenzy of hate at the worshippers of Selune, the lady of the moon, and then he sent in troops to exterminate the heretics -- which meant everyone in sight.</p><p>The Greens rode in the vanguard. Five Centuries, the Second, the Third, the Fifth, the Seventh, and her Century, the Ninth were dispatched under Commander Macha to sweep along the eastern coast and cut off access to the hinterland from boats. Foss's cousin, Ser Linden was sent with them as liaison. Macha was a fair Commander, he might even have made High Commander that summer, but a stray arrow from a minor skirmish penetrated his gorget and he drowned in his own blood before anyone even knew he was wounded. With the Commander dead, Ser Linden took command of the troops. The Centurions didn't like it, but he outranked them, and there was no Lord High Commander Gillings to back them up at base.</p><p>What had started out as a fairly routine contain and control mission became a burn and slaughter route. Day after day the sickened Greens were commanded to attack small villages and kill anyone who resisted. The population fled in front of them, until they reached the end of the peninsula, where they had no where left to flee. The Centurions asked Ser Linden to accept the refuge's surrender. He knifed the man who spoke and then sent the Greens in to kill them all, promising that any trooper who held back would be hung the next morning.</p><p>The screams of the dying, the horror in the eyes of mothers holding children in their arms, forced to chose between drowning and cold steel, heralded the end of the Greens. Many threw down their weapons that night and slipped away into the countryside. She couldn't do that. The corps had been her whole life. She couldn't leave it. Not even when . . .</p><p>The ragged remains of the five Centuries marched back to base at the end of the season. In each town they passed through they were spit on, and not a one of them offered any protest. They all knew they deserved it. Ser Linden crowed of his glorious campaign back at court, but in the following season, a brisk one now that strife had sprung up again in the heartlands, no lord would hire the Greens. They had been disgraced. They had done the unthinkable. It was no good pointing fingers of blame at a strutting young thug, it was the Greens who had done the damage. The Greens who were now anathema, untouchable.</p><p>Lord High Commander Ser Bodwin executed the four remaining Centurions. He had the Squad Leaders and Lancers flogged in public, but he couldn't wash out their sin in blood. He was ruined. Within two more seasons the Greens no longer existed.</p><p>She stayed until the end. The scars on her back from the flogging healed eventually. Her strength and quickness returned, but her innocence and her love of the corps was lost forever. Her name was not associated with the atrocities of that season, the carnage of that last night, but she would never be able to forget. And the ghosts of the innocent dead would find her from time to time, even after all these years, and wake her from her sleep, as they had tonight.</p><p>Tears poured from her eyes, though she squeezed them tight, and she thanked providence for the darkness of the bunkhouse to hide her shame. Outside in the yard she could hear the distant challenges of the guard as they patrolled the perimeters, and she knew from the very darkness of the night that dawn was only an hour or two away. Sleep would not return this night. She knew that also from experience and she lay still in the narrow bunk so as not to disturb the other twenty members of her squad. No reason for them to lose their rest over her crimes. Soon enough the faint light of a new day would tinge the sky gray then pink, and finally the clarion call of the bugles blowing reveille would tumble them all from their beds.</p><p>Then she would get up and move about. Letting the drills and the routine of the day soothe the horror and the shame from her mind. She was a squad leader again, and that was a day-in-day-out job that didn't give you time to dwell on your own troubles. The Order of the Iron Fist had offered her a chance to become a soldier once more, this time in an outfit that didn't fight for money. They challenged evil where they found it and they smashed at it hard with all the weapons at their command. And she was savagely pleased to be one of those weapons. It was all she had right now to keep the old guilt at bay, but the nightmares were less and less frequent these days, and she thought, in the long empty nights like tonight, that perhaps, in the end, it would be enough.</p>
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